Digital-to-analog converters are intended for and capable of converting a digital signal to a corresponding analog signal. When designing and/or selecting a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), it may be necessary to make a trade-off between several performance characteristics of the DAC. Some of the most important performance characteristics for DACs are: resolution, dynamic range, maximum sampling rate and, especially for battery-powered devices, power consumption.
Digital-to-analog converters are nowadays used in a vast variety of devices and for numerous applications. As an example, the field of wireless communication makes particularly high demands on DACs. For example, there is an ongoing demand for increased battery talk and standby time in wireless communication devices, i.e., between battery recharging periods. Efforts are being undertaken to design the power consumption of circuits in the communication devices to perform their functions while consuming a minimum amount of battery power. Reducing the power consumption also has the advantage that the amount of heat generated by the communication device is lower, which typically can be used to reduce efforts for cooling the communication device and/or to facilitate further integration and miniaturization of the communication device.
With the considerable recent growth in the demand for wireless services (e.g., personal communication services (PCS)), the operating frequency of wireless networks have increased and is now well into the gigahertz (GHz) range.
Current and upcoming standards for wireless communications (e.g. LTE) require the signal transmitted by the wireless communication device to have a relatively large dynamic range which calls for a corresponding DAC. High dynamic range DACs allow one to reduce external filtering requirements which may result in a reduction of the total size of the solution and enable support of the ever increasing number of bands of modern wireless communication standards (e.g., LTE).